Japan's blockbuster castle needs energy and imagination

Himeji is Japan's most famous castle. A UNESCO World Heritage site, the largest and best preserved of its kind and the setting for many famous films, it's been near the top of our must-see list since we started planning this trip. It didn't disappoint on the visual grandeur scale, though the interiors take some imagination to bring to life and it's quite a workout to make it through the whole site.

This was our first major sightseeing day and our first head-to-head confrontation with the great enemy of our trip: humidity. Most of the teams competing in the qualifying rounds of the Rugby World Cup would call it the same. Coaches described ball handling as being like juggling a bar of soap, so slicked with sweat was every surface. Throughout our visit, levels of humidity were regularly above 85%, while temperatures hovered in the high 20s (80s F). These are the horror conditions of the American Midwestern summers of my youth. You're soaked with perspiration just standing still. Sunglasses slide off your face because of the moisture. Just getting from point A to B is exhausting, much less doing anything once you're there.

These conditions should have ended by the time we reached Japan, but global weather doesn't follow old patterns these days. Instead, the humidity stayed with us until Typhoon Hagibis blew it away two days before our departure. I loved Japan but having encountered those humidity levels would never, ever consider a return in the summer. At least, in defiance of the weather, the Japanese have perfected their air-conditioning. No British-style sweltering on public transport here. While you might be sightseeing in a steam bath, the trains sweeping you to and from your destination will keep you in cool comfort.

It's a 90-minute train ride from Osaka to Himeji in comfortable, spotless and prompt trains for just £17.80 return. (Each Japanese rail experience makes the UK's infrastructure appear worse in comparison.) The journey itself is attractive, with low, forested mountains rising to your right and Japan's Inland Sea sparkling on the left. Much of the modern sprawl of the coastal plain is ugly; boxy cement blocks, webs of power lines, clusters of light industry and warehouses. But you can spot enough temples in the hills or traditional Japanese buildings in the grey, featureless sprawl to make it interesting.

The town of Himeji itself offers much the same contrast. You arrive into a typical Japanese station cum-shopping mall and exit onto a broad avenue lined with mid-sized office buildings, several slightly tacky shopping arcades stretching away on the sides. This is definitely not a town like Windsor or Warwick, where the history and charm of the eponymous castle stretches to the town beyond. There's nothing to see in modern Himeji. And yet, towering at the end of main street less than a mile from the station is a fairy-tale wonder of Japanese history and architecture.

The most famous part of the castle is its keep, rising stepped pyramid style, each level with distinctive tile roofs that tip up at the corners of the eaves and display showy guardian figures.

The walls are a dazzling (freshly-restored) white, the roof tiles a gunmetal grey that glints almost silver in bright sun. In the 16th century, the locals thought the whole ensemble looked like it was about to take flight, and gave it the name "white heron castle".

Truth is, the whole thing is a lot more impressive from the exterior. After climbing up 150 feet of hillsides bristling with walls and ramparts, you'll reach the basement of the keep and start climbing up six stories ... another 150 feet ... of steep staircases. By the top, you're on something closer to ladders. Each level is mostly the same: plain plaster walls, highly-polished dark wooden floors, no furnishing and little decoration beyond showy metal nail heads. (Japanese architects liked to create these circular bits of metalwork, often adorned with family or religious emblems, to hide the evidence of construction below.) At the top you'll find a small shinto shrine (no photos allowed) and no place to sit.

This was the first time we discovered that the Japanese rarely give you an opportunity to take a break in the middle of sightseeing. There are rest areas at the end of your trail, but whether you're in a castle, garden or museum it seems you are supposed to stay on your feet to consume culture. The idea of sitting and contemplating seems alien.

The keep is so empty in part because it was entirely abandoned by the 20th century so really had no contents by the time it became a cultural landmark. But also because, unlike European castles, the keep wasn't an aristocratic living space. The owners and their inner circle lived in an enormous, horseshoe-shaped enfilade about half-way up the hill. The keep was the domain of the soldiers, and gave the residents of the halls below something gorgeous to look up at. This enfilade, called the nishinomaru, is the most interesting part of the castle but might easily be missed if you follow European logic and simply head from entrance to highest point.

The scores of rooms in the nishonomaru follow one after another along a long, majestic hall, the dark wooden floors shining like mirrors. The fact that everyone must take off their shoes, thus polishing the floors with thousands of socked feet every day, must help enormously. Sliding screens on the outer walls offer a glimpse of gardens below, and on the inner open to living rooms. There's no furniture here, either, but much of the space is filled with descriptions of the history and architecture of the castle, in both Japanese and English. Only one space at the very end could be described as "furnished"; here you'll see traditional tatami mat flooring and a figure of Princess Senhime, probably the most famous ... or at least the most romantic ... resident of the castle.

You'd never really know it, however, from what's on display here. There are a few information boards, and her figure in a fine kimono, but nothing more dramatic to convey her remarkable story. Senhime was the great niece of the first of Japan's three unifiers, Oda Nobunaga, and grandaughter of the third, Tokugawa Ieyasu. In an attempt to keep the peace she was married off at seven to Toyotomi Hideyori, son of second unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who she lived with for 12 years until he lost out to her father and grandfather in a nasty civil war that ended with Hideyori and their son committing a forced suicide. Sen was spirited away, unable to rescue her son but able to save one of Hideyori's other daughters as the rest of the family followed the suicide pact. It's gripping stuff. Sen later remarried, happily, and became chatelaine of Himeji.

These rooms are ripe for a "Princess Sen Experience", similar to Warwick Castle's storytelling. But that does not seem to be the way the Japanese of doing things. You'd think that with their technical sophistication, love of computer gaming and legacy of manga and anime, they'd be at the cutting edge of using multimedia to bring culture to life. Instead, we found Himeji and the majority of their museums and cultural properties to be at least 20 years behind European best practice in interpretation and education. Generally, you look around and get to read a bit of dry, academic text. And that's about it.

That's not to say you should skip Himeji. It's Japan's most famous castle for a reason. It's an architectural tour de force, an ensemble of dramatically beautiful construction you won't find anywhere else. Just appreciate that what you're here to appreciate is a bunch of buildings. There are 83, to be exact, including towers, gates, storehouses, defensive walls, temples, etc. The complex covers 576 acres and, in another quirk of Japanese cultural sightseeing, has no cafe or restaurant within it. Pace yourself.

Fortunately there's a restaurant called Tamagoya directly across from the castle entry that serves tasty set meals and has pleasantly efficient air conditioning. You can use this as a restorative pause before checking out the castle gardens, or as a place to nurse a few beers while your companion does so. (No prizes for guessing who did what at this point.)

Koko-en Gardens lie on the flat lands below the castle, bordered by its moats and the local river. They have a separate entry about 200 metres down the road from the castle and a separate fee; best value is to buy a combination ticket.

These are relatively modern gardens, built in 1992 to celebrate 100 years of Himeji as an official municipality. But you'd never know it if someone didn't tell you. They're built on rigorously traditional lines, with all the elements you'd expect of traditional Japanese guardens: artfully curving ponds full of colourful koi, groves of bamboo, twisting pines, arched bridges, picturesque tea houses. Carefully-placed boulders cross gurgling streams. Stone lanterns collect moss in shady groves. Walls are this garden's unique feature: koko-en is actually a series of nine separate walled gardens, each with a slightly different feel.

Water, however, is significant in most of them. In the biggest garden, an enormous pond reflects diverse planting around it like a mirror while the castle looms above you. In another, a stream is forced into a u-bend along a gravel bank, like a miniature river tamed and transplanted. Sound is as important as appearance in these aquatic features, ranging from the roar of a waterfall to the rhythmic drip of a tiny stream from a bamboo spout. Even still water has noise, as koi breach its surface to grab hovering flies and return with a splash. While still a lot shorter on benches than its European equivalents, there are places to sit, contemplate and appreciate.

And there's a fraction of the tourists who throng through the castle. It's an excellent place to recover from the rewarding but energy-draining excursion up the complex above.